One hundred episodes, ninety-seven different attempts to come up with a different way to describe the establishing shot that reassures viewers the show has not been moved to Reno and staffed by Lt. Jim Dangle. That's right -- tonight's episode is the hundredth for the franchise that pulled CBS from Letterman punchline to...Letterman punchline, albeit one that's now monopolizing the top spots in the Nielsens. Due to the occasional absence, however, this is only my 97th recap of the original series, so my massive 100-episode celebration is still three recaps off. Now I've given you something to look forward to, haven't I?
And I have something to look forward to as well -- a warning telling me that "DUE TO ADULT CONTENT, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED." Excellent -- I'm breathless with anticipation. Which lascivious roundheels will get dispatched to a deserved grave tonight? That is why they have these warnings, right? Because women enjoying consensual sex are offensive until they're dead?
We'll see. Anyway, after a cursory, almost blurry shot of the Strip, we zoom down to a convertible doing somewhere between 80 miles per hour and Mach 2. The cop who's been assigned speeding duty is not amused, and he pulls over the convertible; the driver takes off her stylish Pucci-knockoff headscarf and fixes the police officer with a doe-eyed glance Walt Disney only wishes they could have thought of first. I've always admired women who can work the stylish head scarf thing; if I were to try it, I'd look like I was about to hoe potatoes on the Siberian steppe.
After a brief and breathy exchange beginning with the last thing you'd expect from someone pulled over for speeding ("Officer, thank God you're here"), the woman quickly tells a skeptical patrolman, "Someone is chasing me. You see, I have videos --" "I bet you do," the cop says, continuing, "Let's start with license and registration." Who puts those on vide-- Oh. The woman pleads, "Officer, if I could -- if I could just show you." The officer looks like he's not exactly a closet cineaste.
Cut to the poor woman, dead and bloodied, behind the seat of her convertible. Gil's snapping photos while Catherine runs around the rest of the crime scene. She finds a video camera that has no tape in it. Gil says nothing to this. Catherine notes tire tracks and says, "Not much traffic makes it easier to run someone off the road and slash their throat." Gil adds, "She was slashed south of the border as well." In Taco Bell? That's something they never warn you about. Catherine looks down at the bloody body and comments, "Women in convertibles are low-hanging fruit." Gil does NOT quip, "Let's get the motherplucker who did this." Instead, he's all, "And it was a top-down night."
The Who want to know who's been writing the awful bumper lines this season.
After a brief commercial break, we're in the morgue with Emergency Backup David and Catherine. We're looking at the woman on the table; the impressiveness of the gully someone carved in her neck is surpassed only by the impressiveness of the work someone else did with a surgeon's scalpel -- those lips! Those cheekbones! Anyway, Emergency Backup David's more into the victim's fingers: "That's a nice ring. It has to be at least four carats." Catherine gives him an odd look, and Emergency Backup David's all, "We've been shopping." WE? There's soon to be a Bride of Emergency Backup David? Or is Emergency Backup David merely shopping for rings with all the women of the lab? Catherine's pleased smile could be taken any way, really. Emergency Backup David then begins rattling off all the surgical procedures the victim's had done: artificial breasts, cheek implants, collagen lips. He adds merrily, "You'd be surprised how many women I get on this table with fake parts!" In Las Vegas? Color me shocked. Catherine shrugs, "Plastic lasts longer." Longer even than the fine lines brought on by knee-jerk judgments?
Meanwhile, Sara and Warrick are working the car, a task made considerably less claustrophobic by the fact that there's no roof on the car. Warrick pulls out a cosmetics bag and unzips it. He's awed by the contents: "Wow. Mascara, tweezers, under-eye cream, neck-firming lotion. [snort] Girls. Pads. One, two, three...four jars of depilatory cream?" "That's a lot of bikini wax. Some girls hate the nether stubble," Sara comments. Warrick gives her a look before delicately echoing, "Nether stubble?" You know, it's a little odd that Sara's the authority on girly grooming all of a sudden. Sara goes back to nosing around the car lest this conversation veer into increasingly awkward revelations about the female anatomy and depilation thereof, and finds a Tangiers ID for the vic, right when Warrick finds a driver's license in the glove compartment. The guy who owns the vehicle is one Walter Clancy; the card belongs to Wendy Gardner.
Apparently, things in the morgue have progressed to the point where David the Revelatory Coroner must be brought in to give Gil and Catherine the lowdown on Wendy. One presumes Emergency Backup David has been set free to continue shopping for baubles to present to Bride of Emergency Backup David. David's saying, "The wounds were more profound than I expected." Gil asks, "Profound how?" You know, reading Pynchon, going to symposia on the ethics of reproductive technology, writing monographs on endangered species. Oh, I kid! David explains what he meant: "I was looking for ovaries and I found a prostate." Gil looks slightly nonplussed. Catherine is more to the point: "She was a he?" It's a mixed-up, jumbled-up, shook-up world, Catherine. David stresses, "She had genital reassignment surgery." The former erotic dancer's all, "Wha?" David spells it out using smallish words: "Her testicles were removed and her penis was inverted, creating a vagina." You know, that sounds less like a medical procedure and more like a Fear Factor stunt. Gil avoids dwelling on the genital inversion subject with, "And evidently the killer kept subtracting." And inverting? Let's not underplay the importance of the inverting.
Catherine's all, "Wha?" again because someone in this scene has to play the dummy for exposition's sake, and Gil points out that there's a reason that lump of cartilage in one's throat is called an Adam's apple. He adds, "A man with issues might become upset if he found one on his woman." The man's first issue should be with his own faulty powers of observation, but whatever. Anyway, we get around to the cause of death, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Wendy died from having her throat cut. David makes a few comments on the killing: "Almost surgical in nature. Used an extremely sharp weapon. Vicious attack, probably from somebody emotionally involved." And the best estimate for time of death is some time between 8 PM and midnight. David also collected a standard SAE kit. Catherine's all, "Good. Because top or bottom, this looks like a sexual assault turned into a hate crime." Gil cocks an eyebrow as if to say what I'm thinking: OF COURSE it's a hate crime! Exactly how many brutal throat-slashings count as a love crime?
Cut to the patrolman telling Brass his side of the story: he clocked Wendy's car doing 90, so he nailed it. She told him she was being chased, and asked to show him some videos. Brass deadpans, "How were they?" The patrolman snaps back, "I didn't bite. [But] she was working it." Brass deadpans some more: "Rough duty." We then find out Wendy told the officer the car belonged to her brother and she had lost her license, but the officer let her off with a warning. Brass snarks, "So you had speeding, driving without a license, possible stolen vehicle...and you let her off with a warning." The patrolman would like to know what Brass is implying. Brass says, "She got off pretty easy. How about you?" The patrolman says, "I resent that." Brass says blithely, "Well, I'm sure she resented being sexually harassed and slaughtered two miles from the place you pulled her over!" The officer protests that he didn't even know about Wendy's death until he was called into Brass's office. Brass plows on, noting that the patrolman has a sexual harassment flag in his folder. "So that makes me a sex murderer?" the guy snaps. He has a point. Brass then implies that discovering Wendy's genital reassignment surgery made the guy snap. My question is, why is everyone on this case assuming it's so obvious? Was Wendy required to carry a tattoo on her thigh reading, "Warning: Contents may have been inverted after birth"? And then Brass hauls out the tired accusation that maybe this guy was driven to kill because he's gay. What is it with Brass and the theory that being a self-loathing closet case makes one homicidal? Is this one of those takes-one-to-know-one things?
To wrap up the Brass scene: the patrolman vigorously denies any goings-on with Wendy, and Brass is all, "You're on leave until we can confirm that." He then asks for the guy's DNA and the patrolman lobs a nice line with, "Just tell me where I spit." What I want to know: if this guy's cleared, what recourse does he have against Brass? I'm curious -- there's got to be some sort of "Sorry we thought you were a sex-crazed killer!" form Brass has to fill out, hasn't there?
Ooooh, Archie. Warrick and Catherine are there and there's some blah-blah-blah about evidence and fingerprints and whatnot, but we all know the whole point of the scene is to give us a long, lingering shot of Archie. Well, there's also the revelation that Walter Clancy (license and registration), erstwhile Riviera blackjack dealer, shares fingerprints with Wendy Garner, erstwhile dancer at the Tangiers. We get a shot of the computer screens Archie's using, and boy howdy, does Walter look like one of the people on the Sims box. It's almost as if his image were computer-generated...which it sort of is, after Archie does some monkeying around and everyone figures out that Walter turned into Wendy.
Meanwhile, in another part of the lab, Mia's interrupting Sara as she gazes intently into the microscope. Mia tells Sara, "Wendy's mouth had two foreign DNA donors -- one seminal, one saliva. Neither was a match to Officer Mann." Officer Mann? Why not just name him Tip I. Calmale and have done with it? Sara's all, "Huh?" Mia checks out the ring and comments, "Wow. That is some rock. Platinum setting. Princess cut. Somebody really loved her -- er, him?" Sara says, "I think she's a her." Well, on one level, yes. On the chromosomal level, not so much. That was one of my favorite details in Y: The Last Man -- how, after this plague that wipes out everything with a Y chromosome on the planet save for a man and his monkey, the female-to-male transsexuals became incredibly in-demand by some surviving women. But I digress. Mia says, "A diamond that big, you hope she had it lo-jacked." Sara's counting on that; she just found the serial number NW-583. Apropos of nothing, Mia recounts a story about a man who became a woman because he was enamored of a lesbian...who was actually a male-to-female transsexual. This is a handy way to prime us all into thinking that just maybe, Mia's story will be relevant later. That, or it's here to show how Mia and Sara are awkwardly bonding, as Mia chortles and Sara gives her a really baffled look. Mia retreats with, "Overshare." In a lab where Liam's cherry-popping is apparently up for discussion, I find it hard to believe a story about the vagaries of the human heart crosses the line.
Cut to Wendy's shocked fiancé numbly rattling off details about Wendy's dress. Gil's about as interested in this as you might expect. He's checking out the kazillion pictures of the happy couple. The fiancé --who sounds disturbingly like Buster from Arrested Development, so now I'm having Lucille Austero flashbacks which, when compounded with Liza Minnelli's long history of gender-bending association, from former costar Joel Grey's turn as The Emcee to former husband David Gest's turn as...a really creepy bipedal hominid, are creating the kind of pop cultural tesseract that might spawn another Sontag essay on camp. And then the recap would just totally go off the rails. So let's move on from the fiancé for a moment, and on to Brass, who looks like he's dying to ask the guy, "So, like, when did you first find out your fiancée had a thingie?" Gil is a lot more circumspect: "Mr. Laner, how long had Wendy been a dancer? And by 'dancer,' I mean 'woman'?" He only thinks this second part. Laner stammers, "Two or three years in the line. Never topless. In her costume, she was a vision." Brass tamps down his ruder impulses and asks how long Laner and Wendy had known each other. It's been about a year. The two met in a grief support group: Laner was a widower. Gil says, "Sorry for your loss." Which one? We then find out Wendy was grieving for a twin brother. Brass asks, "Would that be Walter?" Why, yes. A touchingly naïve Laner asks, "Did you know him?" "Sort of," Brass deadpans.
Sara's poking around the house. When she wanders into the bedroom, she notes two twin beds -- one with very feminine pillows and one with very masculine pillows. Wendy and Laner's, we presume. This reminds me of my grandparents, who eventually settled on twin beds, because the first 30 years of covers-stealing and nighttime calisthenics were 29 years too many for them. So I tend to think this is sweet, and not odd like Sara does. I mean, you want odd, try a set-up where it's obvious one's sacking out in a big, luxurious bed while the other's forced to share a sheepskin mat with Fido.
So Sara wanders into the bathroom, which has his-and-her sinks. Clearly, Wendy and Laner had their priorities in line. Wendy's staggering array of cosmetics is matched only by the staggering array of horse pills she's secreted in her medicine cabinet. There's a sticky note with instructions as to which pill to take when, but the name of each pill is omitted, lest fiancé be all, "Baby, why are you taking premarin?" And there's a second sticky note with the legend, "G-105. Section E. 21-33-14." Sara continues working the bathroom, finding a bloody maxi pad in plain view in the trash can. She looks a little thrown, and with good reason. Who in this house can be menstruating? I bet Mia's story is coming back to haunt her now.
She heads into the living room and softens Laner up by warning him she's about to ask a personal question. I would love it if she were all, "Are you...experiencing cramps? Bloating? The shedding of a uterine lining perhaps?" But we don't get any comically awkward moments. Instead, we find out that "we were an old-fashioned couple. Neither of us believed in premarital sexual relations. I mean, that's why I fell in love with her -- because of her traditional values." Gil looks like he's about to burst a gasket, and Sara is looking everywhere but at her coworkers. By the way, Sara's looking pretty foxy in this scene -- the makeup department finally stopped making her look as if she'd been exhumed just prior to shift check-in.
On the way out, Gil's commenting on Sara's Stay-Fresh discovery with, "This is confusing. She had her period. That's impossible -- no uterus, no period." Brass is more interested in exploring the ironic potential of the relationship: "So a guy desperate to change his sex hooks up with a guy desperate not to have any?" Brass is confusing celibacy with loss of libido; plenty of people would be happy to tell you they're not the same thing at all. Sara says, "I think we need to tell Mr. Laner the truth." "Are we sure he doesn't know?" Gil asks. Sara gives him a look like, And when would Mr. Wait Until The Wedding Night have had first-hand opportunity to find out?
After a brief commercial break, we're at the Tangiers, where the showgirls are dazzling the crowds. Gil and Catherine are heading backstage, and he asks her, "Did you ever see any transsexuals when you danced?" Catherine assures him, "Only civilians confuse stripper and showgirls. Can't cheat the full monty." She and Gil bop into the dressing room, where a bunch of women are stuffing their chests into bras designed to make their bosoms look as much like shelves as possible. Catherine makes a one-sided introduction and then breaks the news. The girls take it in remarkable stride, then school Catherine and Gil in how to deliver jaded lines with panache as they point out that many showgirls actually started life as showboys, and given the amount of plastic surgery any female needs to get a job prancing around Las Vegas in a bathing suit, who cares if it includes a "lop job" or not? I love these showgirls, and I want them around as a Greek chorus in every episode. The piece of information propelling us into the scene? Anyone who wants really good transgender work done goes to Dr. Mercer.
A quick establishing shot at a bleak office park later, we're at the good doctor's. Someone's leading a group in which the participants will cover topics like hair removal, walking, and voice pitch. Warrick and Catherine watch for a bit and get the public-service portion of the episode over with as some guy in a white coat explains what MTF and FTM are. Hint: they're not lad magazines. (They're male-to-female and female-to-male.) Ah, this guy is Dr. Mercer. Having steered Warrick and Catherine out to look at the transsexuals so gullible viewers don't get the idea that it's all showgirl costumes and gulling your fiancé, Mercer then gets down to business. He explains that the law requires sex-change candidates to spend one year taking hormones and a second year living as the sex of preference before surgery. Wendy wanted to fast-track the process. Evidently, Wendy found a second opinion. Dr. Mercer continues to perform the PSA portion of tonight's episode, pointing out that "surgery is the easy part. It's life afterwards that's the challenge. Some candidates get depressed or unhappy with their lives and they think surgery is going chase away all their emotional problems." Warrick points out that Wendy didn't commit suicide -- she was killed. Dr. Mercer looks genuinely taken aback. I like him for that. He says, "I am so sorry. As ready as my patients are for the world, I guess the world isn't ready for them."
Speaking of people who have a fractious relationship with the outside world, it's Sara and Mia. Sara had Mia test the blood on the pads she collected, and while Mia can confirm it's Wendy's blood, it's a) not menstrual, and b) containing an anticoagulant, so Wendy was having blood drawn and putting it on pads. "She was faking her period," Mia said. The lab tech -- who is still having problems reconciling the chromosomal read on the situation with the social one -- wonders why anyone would do that, and Sara muses, "Well, she was living as a woman and that's part of it? I-I don't know." At least Sara's trying to regard the evidence from the victim's perspective. Mia says, "You don't draw your own blood. She had to have had help." Sara thinks that her blood-drawing assistant may have been the same doctor who was prescribing all Wendy's meds.
Speaking of people who could maybe benefit from a little medication, in bounces Liam, reporting to Gil that he's run down all the pills in Wendy Garner's bathroom, and "for the record, I really like having a penis." Gil has the look of a man who acutely wishes he were deaf again. Liam backs away from the oversharing ledge and explains that Wendy was taking estrogen conjugates obtained from Mexico, then strikes a blow for health-care reform with, "HMOs don't consider being differently-sexed a life-threatening condition --" "So patients resort to Mexican pharmacies," Gil said. Wendy was also taking premarin, some massive tranquilizers, painkillers, and a broad-spectrum antibiotic. Liam yanks his mind away from his plans for an Up With Penises party to opine, "Sounds like a post-surgery cocktail to me." Gil's phone rings right then and he has this conversation: "Grissom...yes...Mimosa? …Yes…today...the Apple Martini, one o'clock. I'll be there." Liam stands there, disbelieving that people are calling Gil up to beg for lunch dates.
Gil enters the place, and sure enough, it's one of the showgirls from the other night. She's very sultry for lunch hour. Mimosa offers to buy Gil a drink; he declines because he's still on the clock. Oh, come on, Gil. Surely you could have a Shirley Temple? A Virgin Mary? I mean, so long as we're going with the girl-drink theme here, you might as well be gracious and come up with a booze-free alternative. Mimosa purrs, "You still let me lure you away from the lab. Is that because you thought I was a beautiful woman?" She gives him a look that's the very Sontagian definition of camp. Gil looks back, and Mimosa says defiantly, "I'm a beautiful woman now." Gil charms her with, "Beauty is a societal construction." Mimosa points out, "So is gender. People find out you're MTF and they think you're psycho. Michael Caine with a bad wig and a pair of sunglasses stabbing Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill." Or John Lithgow, dressed like Carry Nation in The World According to Garp? (Then again, I found the movie a lot less irritating than the book, in which it's made clear the most tolerable women are either mute [Ellen James] or formerly male [Roberta Muldoon]. A sensitive examination of gender it was not. But I digress.) Mimosa points out, somewhat unnecessarily and with a charming degree of understatement, "DePalma had some issues." Gil declines to comment. Mimosa explains, "You're an outsider -- that's why I trusted you. You get it." She taps his hand lightly, because The Attempted Seduction of Gil Grissom is only slightly less fresh than The Attempted Blowing of Gil Grissom's Mind. Neither are ever successful; watching these people try is just tedious after a while. Mimosa reassures Gil, "This isn't about sex. It's about soul."
Gil finally speaks: "What was it that you wanted to trust me with?" Mimosa gets less arch and more sincere: "I loved Wendy. I was there with her through her whole transition. I was going to be her maid of honor. Do you know how hard it is, for people like us to find love?" Sensing some messy emotion coming up, Gil deflects it by asking Mimosa if she knows what happened. Mimosa says, "She called me, hysterical. Um, I don't know, she kept going on about a videotape or something." Gil presses on the tape -- "Blackmail, pornography?" -- and Mimosa laughs shakily while trying to stanch a sniffle. She says, "Ha! Wendy was such a prude, she'd cover the mirror when she got out of the shower." And yet she was a showgirl. Gil clarifies the dichotomy with, "People confuse your obsession with gender with an obsession with sex." Mimosa tells him, "Imagine being three years old, tormented by the sensation that you had the wrong parts. Your body's like a foreign country, and you're stuck without a passport. All because in your first trimester, your X and Y chromosomes split off and went different directions -- girl brain, boy body." Gil comments, "It's like the [Arthur] Guiterman poem: 'Amoebas at the start -- were not complex; they tore themselves apart -- and started Sex.'" Mimosa quips that Wendy's chromosomes might have been tearing themselves apart in the beginning, but she picked up the slack just fine after that -- "I don't know. Planning a wedding, working a rookie vagina, and about to lose her cherry to a man who doesn't know?" We find out that Wendy brought all of this up in her therapy group, headed by one Dr. Lavalle.
Warrick's photographing Wendy's ensemble when Mia comes in and says matter-of-factly, "Hey. I've been looking for you." On this show, that's practically tantamount to declaring your love for someone. "You found me," Warrick coos, fluttering his eyes at her. And on this show, that's practically tantamount to squealing, "O! I love you too!" Mia misses a beat as the impact of Warrick's slow-burning flirtation hits home, then gets down to business: the blood on Wendy's shoes does not belong to her. Warrick sighs, "Given the nature of this case, it might be misleading, but I'll ask anyway: male or female?" Mia tells him it was one donor, all male, but really, she could have been saying "All mimsy were the borogroves" for all the attention either she or Warrick paying to the words coming out of their mouths. It's all about the flirtatious subtext, which is due to come roaring into supertext right around February sweeps, when Catherine decides that dating Warrick is an excellent way to manage her time by allowing her to multitask and cover both work and pleasure. I look forward to the catfight.
Cut to Brass and Gil visiting Lepidro clinic. By this, the 100th episode, even the most casual viewer will have picked up the etymological and entomological clues necessary to know it's a play on butterflies, a.k.a. the order Lepidoptera (from the Latin "lepid-" [scale] + Greek "pteron" [wing]). But the play here is not on scaly people who fly a lot, but on the people who are breaking out of a larval cocoon into a beautiful butterfly state. Y'all, I have had it with the Lepidoptera metaphors lately.
As Gil and Brass come inside, a youngish woman -- pretty in a blandish, Kimberly Williams kind of way -- bids a little girl adieu with, "Bye-bye, scrumptious pumpkin." The kid tells Amber to beat it, and the man with her smiles genially at the law enforcement types. Oh, he'll stop smiling soon enough. His name is Francis; Dr. Lavalle is his wife. The little girl comments, "Grown-ups always do that," and without missing a beat, Francis replies, "That's gender stereotyping, honey." Ha! This totally reminds me of living near Berkeley. Brass and Gil introduce themselves and break the news of Wendy's death in their own inimitable fashion. Francis leads them outside to what really does look like north Berkeley, what with the Craftsman-type use of natural stone in the architecture, the seamless incorporation of outdoor and indoor elements in the yard, and the lush, green grass. After a snippet of conversation establishing that yes, transsexuals are just like us in that they go to church, Dr. Lavalle gets yanked out of group and into another scene.
This scene has her cataloging how she travels the world because "6000 women a day suffer genital mutilation." Gil asks, "So you travel around the world, treating victims of sexual treachery?" Dr. Lavalle points out, "You don't have to travel to find the genitally disenfranchised." Brass asks if Wendy was among those, and Dr. Lavalle tells us Wendy had been denied surgery, and she had been working "on what had made [Wendy] an unacceptable candidate." Hint: Wendy was impatient. She was also "passing" -- something Dr. Lavalle didn't recommend, but Wendy was adamant that her fiancé Aaron wouldn't know the truth. And she pins this as the reason Wendy was so agitated when she came in for an individual consult the night before. During all of this, Dr. Lavalle has neatly managed to distract the CSIs from finding out how exactly Wendy found the doctor who performed her surgery. I'm still trying to figure out when she had it. Wendy's whole gender timeline is really murky. Gil asks if Dr. Lavalle videotapes sessions, and that idea gets shot down as a violation of patient privacy.
Hey! It's Nicky! Inexplicably looking up the house of someone named Wendy Jones, instead of Wendy Garner. No wonder it took him three seasons to work solo. Anyway, we're ostensibly retracing Wendy Garner's last steps, and the whole point to this scene is that there's a tidy little chunk of time between her appointment with Dr. Lavalle and her run-in with Officer Mann that's unaccounted for, and Wendy may have spent it dropping by a storage facility.
Miracle of miracles, the team has determined exactly which storage facility Wendy was referring to with, "G-105. Section E. 21-33-14." Personally, I would have liked to see how they did that, but the show's elected to skip that part in favor of showing Warrick, Nicky, and Catherine clomping down the hall to the unit. The place is lit like the entire movie Se7en was, so we're all forewarned that something disturbing is about to happen, and even those tuning in on a black and white TV get it, because the music's gotten all ominous too. Warrick conveniently notices footprints leading to the unit in question. "Those look like bloody footprints," Catherine notes. Observations like this are why she's promotion material.
Nicky opens the combination lock while Warrick and Catherine stand around and look apprehensive. Then he looks over his shoulder at them; he's also working the anxious expression. Nicky rolls the door open and Warrick trains a light on the darkened compartment. We see what he does for a moment -- a pool of blood, a steel table, and a body lying in stirrups. Warrick shouts, "Nicky, hit the lights!" Nicky does, and the background strings go into Psycho shrieking mode as we see the full tableau: a woman, dead on the table, with blood everywhere. I have a horrible flashback to the Demi Moore vignette in If These Walls Could Talk where she's bleeding to death after her back-alley abortion, the scene's that seedy and pathetic and angering. Warrick mutters an anguished, "Oh, God…" while Catherine and Nicky settle for saucer-eyed stares. Yeah, that's not one of those situation that inspires a bit of Shavian badinage.
Everyone takes the commercial break to recover, and when we get back, Warrick's working the bloody footprints while Nicky and Catherine process the scene inside. Nicky asks Catherine, "What do you think went on here?" and she gets to practice Management Skill #216: Bumper Lines: "Someone outsourced their health care to the wrong provider." Nicky turns back to his camera with a look like, "That answer was neither informative nor witty. Thank you." Catherine's poking around the tarp under the examining table, and she picks up a blood-stained glove, quipping, "At least something was sterile." Nicky guesses the gloves might explain the lack of prints. Brass comes in to tell us that there's no way to track down the renter, as the normal-seeming man paid cash. Catherine opines, "Normal people don't torture people in storage bins." Well, that's closer to the epigrammatic stylings of Gil Grissom. Catherine might be management material yet!
The body's been taken back to the morgue, where it's being given a CAT scan. This is how we see that there's a coat hanger-shaped twist of piano wire where the uterus would be, if the body had belonged to someone with XX chromosomes. David the Explanatory Coroner tells Catherine: "Piano wires. Used to immobilize the lower abdominal skin and anchor the neo-vagina so it can heal in place...the surgeon stuffs the portal with a cylinder wrapped in gauze to hold [the portal]'s shape while it heals, and sutures it." ["I think we all could have done without the particular verb 'to stuff' there, DAVID. Damn." -- Sars] Catherine asks tentatively how long milady has to wear a wire. David tells her, "After five days the vagina's unsutured and wires are removed. Scarring indicates multiple surgeries; she appears to have gone in for repair due to infection." Catherine figures that's not a normal side effect, and David postulates that someone may not have been taking their meds. Catherine counters that "they were taking some bad Mexican bootlegs." She then calls attention to the stubble on the woman's face, and David drops a science fact with, "It's a myth that hair grows after death. What happens is, the skin contracts, revealing whiskers. The contraction of the erector pilae muscles, combined with fixed lividity, indicates time of death." Which is a cool forensic science fact and all, but did we really need a TMIcam shot of skin contracting when there were so many other cool things we could have seen in this episode -- like the piano wire? The reason we're learning this fun forensic fact is not because CSI is 3-2-1 Contact for the primetime set, but because this is how David established that this woman died before Wendy did. The death was accidental -- David explains, "Loss of blood due to hemorrhage. Pelvic artery was severed. My theory: surgery one was botched. Round two: they repaired her to death."
And now Catherine gets to examine all the items found in the back-alley surgeon's office. Of particular note: the cylinder wrapped with gauze is actually a tube of toothpaste -- probably your first indication that you're not dealing with someone who has ready supply to medical supply catalogues -- and that toothpaste has a bloody fingerprint on it. So someone was mucking around with something bloody, picked up the tube, then wrapped the gauze around it...and did what? I mean, if this is what the back-alley surgeon used to "fix the portal" (as it were) then why didn't they wrap it ahead of time? It would seem like poor time management to halt a penis-inversion procedure to loop some gauze around a tube of toothpaste.
But I'm getting bogged down in petty details. There's also time for Mia to find sweat still pooled in the two-day old glove. I don't care how climate-controlled that storage locker was, even my sweat-soaked marathon-running shirt dried out in a day -- and that was with it wadded up and crammed in a suitcase. This is the second piece of evidence in this montage I've found odd. Only Nicky's AFIS discovery that the dead person is one Vern Saldusky, a.k.a. "Tawny," "Peaches," or "Vava," is remotely interesting, and that's because -- well, who wouldn't be amused by someone named Vava working at the Cockpit on Budlong Avenue? It sounds so comically prurient.
And now Nicky and Gil are at the Cockpit. Nicky awkwardly asks the bartender -- who looks as though she's just begun hormones -- if she knows of Vern, a.k.a. Peaches, and the bartender totally smacks him down with, "Just a second, honey." Gil smirks. Nicky's all, "Oh...kay." We get a look around at all the businessmen making time with the ladies -- this is like a taxi dancing place, only with transsexuals. How retro-deviant! And then the bartender sends them back to talk to Mercedes. Nicky reflexively says, "Thank you." "You're welcome," the bartender says, not backing down on eye contact. "Thanks," Nicky says nervously. Heh. I bet Gil brought Nicky along just to blow his mind. And just once, I would love it if there were one of these cases where the CSIs are dealing with some incredibly immersive and arcane subculture, and Nicky was inexplicably well-versed in it. There Warrick and Gil would be, eyes popping as they tried to figure out what was going on, and people would be emerging from steaming vats of bouillon or stripping off Japanese tentacle monster costumes, and yelling out, "Nick! Hey, big guy! I thought this was your night off?"
Ah, but it's not to be. The guys head into the back, where the blue lighting makes Nicky look like he's got a backup career as a member of the Blue Man Group. All the girls are busy plunging syringes into each other's faces, and after Nicky comments, "I've never seen junkies shoot up in the face before," one of the girls says irritably, "It's not smack. It's silicone. It gives you good cheekbones." Nicky turns around and lands with his face in the looming Mercedes's corseted bosom. She hisses, "The ones who can't afford silicone? Shoot motor oil." Understandably ruffled, Nicky says shortly, "Do they?" Mercedes purrs, "Calm down, pretty boy. We're not the real monsters. The real freaks are the suit and ties who want to take a walk on the wild side before sneaking back to the wife and kids. Wanna go?" Nicky somehow manages to shake his head no -- kind of hard with Mercedes all up in his face. Gil, meanwhile, is hanging back and smirking. He eventually rescues Nicky by explaining that they're from the crime lab. Mercedes snaps, "Isn't this the part where you say my [parole officer] would be interested to know that I'm hustling, and you'd like a freebie." "I'm actually not interested in your ass," Gil clarifies. Nicky's turn to smirk. Gil continues, "But I am looking for a human butcher who might be." Mercedes bids him to go on. Gil does: "The game is helping transgenders who've been turned down for surgery." Mercedes gestures the guys over to an alcove and says sotto voce, all attitude gone, "You want Benway. Benway did my transformation, but something went wrong, and now I can't be a man or a woman. Want to see?" Nicky tells her that's all right, and Mercedes says despairingly, "No, it's not all right! He keeps canceling my corrective surgery." Gil tries to look on the bright side with, "That may be why you're still alive." Mercedes continues, "My friend had to go back four times. Finally, he fitted her with a colostomy bag. Benway felt so bad, he hooked it up for free." Nicky says dryly, "Where can we find this humanitarian?" That's the hundred-dollar question: Benway travels in and out of town -- "Bulgaria? Bosnia? One of the -ias! Nobody's ever seen him. He flies in and he flies out. He shows up just as you're going under, and skips before you come to." The scene ends with the guys finding out that Tawny had just visited Benway.
Back in the lab, Catherine's telling Sara and Nicky that Jacqui got a hit off the toothpaste tube -- "It came back for one Dr. Karl Benway, military service." Warrick hands over a photo of one of the more baroque -- or gothic, depending on whether you're referring to the aesthetic design of the figure, or its symbolic potential for horror -- things they found at the site, and shares that it's an abdominal retractor, used to keep the abdominal cavity open during surgery and sold only in surgical supply stores. Surprise, surprise, Dr. Karl Benway is the only individual who's purchased one in the last year and a half. Nicky and Gil come in all smirking because they think they've got something, and right after Nicky says, "We know the name of the butcher," Sara, Warrick, and Catherine all chorus, "Benway." Gil takes a moment to recover before asking, "What do you know about him, and do you have an address?" After Sara bemoans the lack of a paper trail, Catherine sums up that they've got a non-doctor who served in the military but doesn't drive and never leaves the country. Just then, Liam pops in and delivers a self-aggrandizing monologue about the scutwork he endures in the name of love -- er, in the name of "because Sara asked him to." And eventually, he gets around to telling us more about the Butcher Benway: "Viet Nam vet. Served as a medic. Then it looks like he did a short stint with the Sanctuary Alliance in Ghana. He goes from Ghana to Mexico, where he's arrested and deported for performing illegal abortions." Sara asks if Benway's medical license was revoked, and that's how we found out he never went to medical school. "In 1983, Benway watched too much MTV and fell under the influence of the New Romantic aesthetic, if the eyeline and moussed mullet are any indication, and he was arrested for protesting outside the Supreme Court. In 1987, he was Photoshopped into a San Francisco Chronicle snapshot and interviewed for an article at an anti-nuke rally." Or something to that effect. Gil looks at all of this and concludes Dr. Benway is also Dr. Lavalle.
Cut to Brass saying with the brand of deadpan insincerity only he can conjure, "You must get pretty jet-lagged flying to Bulgaria. Or is it Romania -- Karl?" Dr. Lavalle looks embarrassed. She says, "I haven't been Karl Benway for a very long time." Brass replies, "Yeah -- like three days ago when you killed Vern Saldusky at the E-Z Access storage unit? That's a hell of a place for an operating room. I mean, why not go all the way and use the men's room at the bus station?" Gil finally pipes up and says, "We found your fingerprint there." "I never said I wasn't there. I attended Vern's surgery. He was terrified. I tried to calm him," Dr. Lavalle says. Brass thinks she succeeded: "You don't get any calmer than dead." "I'm a counselor," Dr. Lavalle insists. Brass sighs and asks, "Is that how your fingerprint ended up in a three-day-old vagina? Counseling?" Dr. Lavalle snaps, "I've devoted my life to helping those cast out by gender prejudice. Where would these souls be without me?" Alive? Not needing colostomy bags? Not stuck in a hellish netherworld between genders?
Dr. Lavalle continues, "Who will stand in judgment as to who's a candidate and who's not? Dr. Mercer? The accredited physician?" Or something like that. The monologue continues for a while in the me-me-me vein, and after Dr. Lavalle quavers with outrage that "I've been performing gender reassignment surgeries for ten years," Gil points out that she's been doing so without benefit of a medical degree. Brass asks, "How many Verns have there been?" "How many Wendys?" Gil adds. Dr. Lavalle eventually breaks down: "Vern was an unfortunate tragedy. I have no idea what happened to Wendy." Brass thinks he knows: Wendy saw Dr. Lavalle with Vern, so Dr. Lavalle killed her lest the secret get out. Dr. Lavalle snots, "That's impossible. After I saw Wendy at the clinic, I went straight to my daughter's soccer game. I have nothing more to say." Gil chirps, "We need you to say, 'Ahhhh.'" Out comes the DNA sample swab.
Cut to Mia and Catherine chatting as Mia explains that the DNA she collected from the latex gloves was female, so that more or less knocks out the now-arrested Dr. Benway. The doctor had help.
But not from her husband, who is the antithesis of "calm," "cool," and "collected." Warrick rolls his eyes at Francis's histrionics and deflates the man's delusions about affecting the CSIs with a blasé "Officer, could you escort this man out of here?" Nicky's object lesson from that? He's noticed that Francis is a spitter. This news excites Warrick. Nicky swabs the glob of spit for further analysis, while Warrick pokes through the house and finds an unraveled videotape. Attracted by Francis's shouting -- and maybe the potential for even more spitting -- Nicky heads outside in time to see Francis bullying the "scrumptious pumpkin"-saying woman of many scenes ago (Amber) to take his daughter away from the scene because "she's your kid too, you take some responsibility." Because Amber was so irresponsible as to protest that she had to take the night shift at the hospital. Amber stubs out her cigarette with her white hospital clog, then snaps at her daughter before driving off again. Nicky heads over and grabs the still-damp, still-smoking butt.
Cut to Amber protesting that she doesn't know why she's at the police station. Because you're caught up in events beyond the 48-minute mark. Nobody is immune to events beyond the 48-minute mark! It is a tide of narrative inevitability -- fight it, and you will be pulled under like so much flotsam or jetsam. Nicky has a different answer: "You're here because I compared your DNA from this cigarette butt to DNA found in sweat recovered from the inside of a latex glove at a crime scene." Amber grimaces in defeat, and we flash back to her at the scene as Tawny begins bleeding all over the place. Nicky says guilelessly, "Ms. Hamshaw -- Dr. Lavalle was performing illegal surgeries at a storage unit and you were assisting. Why would you be involved in something like that?" Because "Mona and Francis helped me clean up. They gave me money to be a surrogate mother for Tippi, and got me my RN degree. They're family." Nicky winces as he tries to keep this straight: "So Tippi has two dads and one mom?" No, she's got two moms and one dad. We then rule out Amber as a suspect in Wendy's murder.
Meanwhile, Liam pulls fingerprints off the unraveled videotape. He then passes it off to Archie, who plays it. We see footage of Wendy's bridal shower -- it's very sweet, and it's so nice to see something on this show where we get a sympathetic depiction of the victim as a person with a life and loved ones, instead of merely somebody's victim -- and then we see grainy footage of the surgery unit with Wendy gasping, "How could you do this? I just wanted you to keep my secret from Aaron -- not this! I trusted you! How could you just leave her like this?" We see some shots not unlike the displays in Human Body Worlds and hear Wendy sobbing like Bette Davis, "So…much...blood!" and then the tape abruptly switches to Wendy at her wedding shower saying warmly, "This day means so much to me, and to have girlfriends like you -- it's just amazing." Archie comments, "Thirty seconds of mutilation recovered over a bridal shower?" and Warrick reminds us that Wendy had told Mimosa and Officer Mann she had videos to show, so she was probably trying to expose Lavalle. Warrick's cell rings then; it's plot acceleration, ruthlessly paring away suspects by confirming that Amber and Mona Lavalle were at Tippi's soccer game.
Just then, Liam comes in and nudges us closer to resolution by revealing that the fingerprints he pulled off the tape belong to...Francis! Brass says, "Help me understand something. Wendy videotaped the storage area, threatening to expose your wife's 'good work,' because your wife was threatening to tell Wendy's fiancé that she's not what she appears to be. But the three of you were still getting it on?" Francis is nearly as surprised by this line of questioning as I am. I realize Brass rarely comes up with the right scenario (see also: "What are you, gay?") but there's no reason to dredge this up from the wine-dark depths of his imagination. Or maybe there is: the DNA samples from Wendy's mouth confirm that Francis had been swapping spit with the deceased, but Dr. Lavalle had been swapping semen. And that's how we figure out Dr. Lavalle was probably denied sex-change surgery at some point and is, to quote Brass's pithy term, "still packing." Francis then utters a phrase I never thought I'd have occasion to type: "Yes, and I performed fellatio on my wife. After lunch. Is that a crime?" No, but the phrase "performed fellatio on my wife" is wigging out Catherine and Brass too. Them, and the rest of the internet -- I just Googled the phrase and there's no results. Looks like this page is about to get very popular, huh?
In any event, we finally get to the bottom of this: Francis went back to the storage area to dispose of Vern's body and saw Wendy leaving. He chased her down and killed her. Francis claims it's because "I tried to protect my wife's work. Not just for us, but for people like us." What, all the people who dabble in surgery?
Anyway, Catherine and Sara are heading out, and Catherine's ruefully commenting that "He admits to murder but not infidelity?" Sara points out that it's possible Francis didn't cheat: assuming he was not in a spitter in one key sense, he'd have had a healthy little sperm sample swimming around his mouth for a while, and when he killed Wendy, he reverted to his spit-flying ways, thus passing on his spit and Dr. Lavalle's semen. Whatever. The real interesting scene is commencing now: Gil is in his office, telling Mimosa, "I thought you'd want to know what happened to Wendy." Mimosa thanks him and says sadly, "Killed by someone in our own community -- as if we didn't have enough enemies." Gil looks sympathetic. Mimosa says, "Her parents never understood her. Still I think they should know. What do I say?" Gil suggests, "Show them an oyster." Mimosa's understandably confused, and Gil elaborates: "There are two types of male oysters, and one of them can change genders at will. And before man crawled out of the muck, maybe we had the same option. Maybe originally, we were supposed to be able to switch genders, and being born with just one sex is a mutation." Mimosa looks up at Gil, comforted, and he sort of smiles.
And I know the oyster scene's supposed to be a sweet little connecting moment between Mimosa and Gil, but it's giving me Spartacus flashbacks to the notorious scene where the following not-heavily-coded scene takes place in a Roman bath as Marcus Licinius Crassus (Lawrence Olivier) attempts to seduce his slave Antonius (Tony Curtis):
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you eat oysters?
Antoninus: When I have them, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you eat snails?
Antoninus: No, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be
moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?
Antoninus: No, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Of course not. It is all a matter of taste,
isn't it?
Antoninus: Yes, master.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: And taste is not the same as appetite, and
therefore not a question of morals.
Marcus Licinius Crassus: My robe, Antoninus. My taste includes both snails and oysters.
So Gil's parable of the polygendered mollusk might not be nearly so comforting to Wendy's family as Gil thinks. It may conjure up gladiator movies, which is a pretty touchy topic unto itself. Or maybe the story will work. We won't know.